Station Eleven

I found out about Station Eleven through an NPR podcast. I had added the book to my reading list but didn't get around to reading it before my wife suggested we watch the show. We get four or five episodes into the show and I am confused on character motivations - characters in the show don't behave how real humans would. So I looked to the book to fill in the blanks.

I found that the book far out-shined the show when it came to quality. The show seems lost in trying to append a moral message and action sequences to the book's initial plot. It takes what it wants from the show, primarily character names and origins and overarching plot points like the Georgia Flu, then twists them into an alternative interpretation in an effort to distinguish itself from the book. In my opinion, instead of bastardizing the well-written story of the original novel, the show should have created it's own characters with their own motivations built in the same universe. The two mediums needed never cross paths, but instead are forced into comparison.

Focusing on the book, I found it uplifting and hopeful. After each reading session, I found myself looking at things in my life that I take for granted - especially technology and the internet - and I see them with fresh eyes and renewed appreciation. I am writing this message using a machine that translate kinetic energy on a keyboard into electricity and stores that electricity as a series of 1s and 0s somewhere on a server someone else hosts. The concept is astounding and its recreation would be nearly impossible if everyone responsible suddenly died. In my opinion, this is where the book excels. Pointing out the things in modern life that take astounding feats to produce and result in simple tasks - all this effort should be honored and appreciated more than we do now.

Station Eleven is a novel about a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, but, crucially, it is not about the end of the world so much as it is about the birth of a new one.

It follows several characters through different periods in their lives, from decades before the pandemic, to its early days, to 15 and 20 years after the event. Most of the main characters are creatives with different relationships to their art, and to Arthur Leander, a famous actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear, on the day that the pandemic reaches North America. His death serves a focal point, and symbolically as the death of the old world that brings forth new life.

Life after the pandemic is difficult and dangerous, especially at the beginning. However, most of the focus is on a period 20 years after the event, when people have mostly settled down into relatively stable settlements. It follows the Travelling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who travel the Great Lakes region of North America performing Shakespeare and classical music, and a man who builds a museum of artifacts from the fallen civilisation. It's not about an animalistic, Hobbesian struggle for survival, but the preservation of culture and memory, and communicating what we are into the future, because, as the (borrowed) slogan of the Travelling Symphony puts it, "survival is insufficient".

It's about memory and trauma, loss, isolation and hope, it's in turn haunting and terrifying, but above all, beautiful. Loved it.

Oh dear, another one of those award winning books that has gone over my head. Very mediocre story, been down many times before and brings nothing new to the genre. I can sort of see what the plan was with this book, riding on the coat tails of the mighty world war z, shame it wasn't executed well enough. Too much of the story is based in the past and not enough time is spent on the evolution of the characters after the apocalypse.

The book had a strong ending so it got an extra star for that. I think something that would have given this book more of an edge would have been the addition of bits of the graphic novel/comic that is mentioned throughout the story.

I'm sure this is going to be made into a movie/TV series at some point and I have to admit I'm looking forward to what they can do with it.